--- title: Wimbledon Championship: Google Doodle Celebrates 140 Years description: As Wimbledon 2017 kicks off, Google's new Doodle celebrates the 140th anniversary of the world's oldest tennis tournament. canonical: https://time.com/4843436/google-doodle-wimbledon-championship-tennis/ author: Kevin Lui article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-07-03T03:31:02.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:47:29.591Z og:title: Google Doodle Celebrates 140 Years of Wimbledon og:description: The world's oldest tennis tournament first started back in 1877 og:url: https://time.com/4843436/google-doodle-wimbledon-championship-tennis/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltdd2c8ec435590b6d/6988d44c656a3f82d8bd0af0/140th-anniversary-of-wimbledon-5176535811096576-2xa.gif?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 711 og:image:height: 400 og:image:alt: 140th-anniversary-of-wimbledon-5176535811096576-2xa og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google Doodle Celebrates 140 Years of Wimbledon twitter:description: The world's oldest tennis tournament first started back in 1877 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltdd2c8ec435590b6d/6988d44c656a3f82d8bd0af0/140th-anniversary-of-wimbledon-5176535811096576-2xa.gif?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Google Doodle Celebrates 140 Years of the Wimbledon Championships > Sponsored content. 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Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-brief-2026q3/newsletters?i=8fbaf107-bf74-4046-afa8-4f48e7becceb&cr=time-nl-brief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Kevin Lui](https://time.com/author/kevin-lui/) ## Kevin Lui Jul 3, 2017 3:31 AM UTC  Google by [Kevin Lui](https://time.com/author/kevin-lui/) ## Kevin Lui Jul 3, 2017 3:31 AM UTC As Wimbledon 2017 kicks off on Monday, Google [rolled out a new Doodle](https://www.google.com/doodles/140th-anniversary-of-wimbledon) to celebrate the 140th anniversary of the world’s oldest tennis tournament. The Doodle features a green background — an homage to the grass courts on which Wimbledon matches are played — and two animated tennis rackets playing a quick round. The Google letters form the audience, save for the letter L, which becomes the match’s umpire. A bird tucked away on the top right corner is Rufus the Hawk, “who dutifully shoos away any pigeons who land on the court during a match” according to Google. The search giant also featured a few earlier concepts, including one that depicts the rain that so often disrupts Wimbledon proceedings. “To many fans and players, Wimbledon is tennis,” writes Google about the Championships that first started in 1877\. “Good luck to this year’s competitors!” This year’s tournament runs from July 3-16 and Britain’s Andy Murray will play in the first match on Center Court as he tries to defend his title. World champion Serena Williams will be absent this year after [announcing her pregnancy](http://time.com/4746572/serena-williams-pregnant-twitter-reactions/) in April. ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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